A Question....

[libgirl.livejournal.com]

Has there been any consideration about age restrictions at the suggested archive?

As a long-time, multi-fandom participant and talking with another one this week over the issue at LJ and with fanlib, two things came up:

1. As long as we're paying someone else to host our things, they can decide not to host specific things. Also, people will attempt to make a profit off of us in any way possible. The best solution is to host our own site with a dedicated server than can house us all.

2. We were talking and we both agreed that if there was a multi-fandom fanfiction hub, we wouldn't want it to be along the lines of ff.net. Everyone I know cringes when a news source goes to ff.net to talk about the "fandom phenomenon". That said, admitting fic.'s based on quality is tricky and subjective. If we create something, for ourselves, then I hope that we would both cover ourselves legally and present ourselves professionally. There is a legal issue involving minors and NC-17 material than can only really be remedied by not allowing minors. The easiest solution seems to be creating a panfandom archive for underage readers either in association with or as part of the larger archive, requiring a age statement to sign up and logged-in-only access to adult material. Also, if there are no underage readers allowed, then there is less likelihood of creating another ff.net.

I know that this will probably not be a popular opinion. I know that many people in fandom, particularly on LJ are underage and "passing" or "socking" in order to read adult material. I'm not saying that some underage readers cannot handle adult material or aren't already participating in adult activities; however, from a legal standpoint, it seems more responsible to take precautions.

Additionally, in light of the recent LJ events, it's obvious that much of what gets archives, websites, journals and fic.'s shut down is a perceived danger to the "childrenz". If this is a site by adults, for adults it's less likely to come under that sort of negative fire. After all, we're going to have to deal with the legal ramifications of intellectual property and copyright laws already.

I'm truly not trying to rock the boat or ignore the many and important contributions of underage fans to fandom. I'm just trying to ascertain how the issues of liability will be dealt with.

Comments

[labellementeuse.livejournal.com]

And sadly IP's seem to react by shutting down the site--which none of us want.

Yeah. I mean there's an extent to which, no matter personal feelings on the matter, protection from being shut down by Higher Powers is kind of vital.

[franzeska]

Much more important is the ability to easily back up the whole archive so it may be moved and/or restored. Every ISP screws up sometimes and any site can be the target of accusations, justified or otherwise.

[risha]

Backups should be a given, anyway, no matter what sort of technology you're talking about. You never know when someone is going to accidentally hit the wrong button.

[damned-colonial.livejournal.com]

Mmmm. Not only should we be able to make backups, I reckon we should make the database dumps publicly available so that anyone can bring up a new site if they want/need to. Wikipedia does this, for example, allowing people to copy the entire Wikipedia to their own hard drives or make another copy of it in another country if they want. I wrote a bit of an article touching on how that could be done, which is linked from http://damned-colonial.livejournal.com/414885.html if you're interested.

[libgirl.livejournal.com]

That sounds like a smart idea. The more accessible, maintainable it is, the better IMHO.

[damned-colonial.livejournal.com]

Thanks :)

[(Anonymous)]

Thanks :)